This writer has revered The New York Times since being introduced to it in ninth grade by a Catholic nun. Sister Umile Marie, who was about as tall as the paper was wide in the early 1960s, had her English class devour its pages weekly for lessons in how to structure a story and how sentences should be built. Over the years, the Times generally rewarded one’s faith while, like most Catholics, registering sins of commission and omission. A nearly lifelong love affair foundered on March 9, however, when the paper published an advertisement from the Freedom From Religion Foundation headlined “IT’S TIME TO CONSIDER QUITTING THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.” The “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics” advised, “You’re better than your church, so why stay?.... Apparently you’re like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go… We invite you to free yourself from incense-fogged ritual…” The option offered for those who oppose the U.S. bishops’ denial of rights to contraception is to become a member of the Foundation, a group for “freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and other skeptics).” The ad crossed the line between advocacy and bigotry, and the Times should have known better.

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In the wake of his preemptive demolition of five North Beach cottages, calls are being heard for the resignation of Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. George Price. In a letter to The Cape Cod Chronicle, Jared Fulcher of South Chatham charged that Price’s “ignorance of everyone’s opinion, save for his own and those who agree with him, presents a dangerous mindset, for which we have just seen the beginning.” The paper itself did not call on Price to step down, but editorialized that “the dull knife that he’s chosen to wield will leave a big and long-lasting scar, not only on North Beach Island but on the Cape Cod National Seashore’s relationship with the town.” Rebecca Ayres Mullin of Eastham agreed in her letter to The Cape Codder, telling Price he “could have bent with the reeds, yet you stand solid as the oak and shove your large governmental boot on the very place and people you should respect.”

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Sometimes a head shot is just a head shot, but sometimes it’s a character study. Kudos to the Falmouth Enterprise’s Christopher Kazarian for his portrait of a starchy-looking candidate for the town’s conservation commission. A civil engineer, the hopeful told selectmen that “he tends to side with humans versus the animals,” as the reporter put it. “You are inviting the fox to the chicken coop,” the candidate declared. The board thanked him for his candor and made him an alternate member.

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Good for the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School student council, which hosted a real “senior” prom last month at the town’s senior center. Teenagers chatted with sixty-, seventy- and eightysomethings before hitting the dance floor, The Register reported. Our vote for the money quote? The student council treasurer’s: “One lady said it was the first time she had danced in the 12 years since her husband died.”

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Thanks to The Cape Codder’s Tim Sweeney for telling readers about Carla, the new Brazilian restaurant on Main Street in Orleans, and its eponymous owner, Carla Lima DeOliveira. Her story is inspiring: when her daughter was born with a congenital condition that doctors in Brazil said they couldn’t address, she dropped out of college, left her job and came north so Raissa, then 2, could be treated at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “She got a job at the Barley Neck Inn [in Orleans], stated learning English, made many trips to Boston for [her daughter’s] many surgeries and visits, while working 100 hours a week and working to stay in the U.S.,” Sweeney wrote. “Today, Raissa is a 14-year-old honor student at Nauset Regional High School, and DeOliveira has her green card.”

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We wish Thornton Burgess were alive to spin a tale of Minny the Mink, but we’ll settle for Diana Barth’s story-telling in The Bourne Enterprise: “Last summer, Mr. Johansen reported, he was fishing on the canal when a mink scrambled up the rip-rap, fish in mouth, and dived into a burrow some three feet from him. He was close enough, he said, to hear the mink family chattering.” Fisherman Carl Johansen told Barth that the mink are a welcome change from the rats that used to infest the rip-rap.

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Will they play Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” at candidate debates in Chatham this year? Incumbent Scott Summers wants another term as selectman, says The Cape Cod Chronicle, and newcomer Judith Winters is looking to join the board. It’s not a surprise to see Winters “spring” into action; she was among those who wanted to see Summers “fall” off the board after he declined to renew then-Town Manager Bill Hinchey’s contract.

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It’s never too early to develop your sense of humor. In an Enterprise article about The Inside Scoop, the student paper of the Morse Pond School in Falmouth, Brent Runyon noted that the youngsters publish an April Fools’ edition. Their story about “Take Your Siblings to School Day” convinced some parents to bring their younger children to school.

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They don’t do things by halves out at the Cape’s tip. When cabaret singer Joyce Aimee decided to hold an estate sale at the home she built in 1977 overlooking Provincetown Harbor, circumstances called for a party complete with cocktails, a raw bar and hors d’oeuvres plus a performance by the artist Josephine Baker once dubbed “Chanteuse Dangereuse.” The Banner reported that the $25 admission fee would go to the Lower Cape Outreach Council. As for Aimee, who “opened the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas with Vic Damone right after Bugsy [Siegel] was shot,” she’ll return to her primary residence in Los Angeles.

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Robert Whritenour is a man-about the Cape & islands. The former town manager of both Falmouth and Mashpee now plays that role in Oak Bluffs on the Vineyard, to which he commutes from his home in Falmouth. He has a daughter who goes to school in Hyannis and a son attending the Mashpee schools. According to the Enterprise, he’ll marry Jessica Erickson, the administrator for Falmouth’s The 300 Committee, this year. Peter Boyer, the Falmouth town manager Whritenour succeeded in 2001, moved on to serve as administrator of the 300 Committee in the 2000s.

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Writers plant seeds that grow in readers’ minds and hearts, but sometimes also in the ground. Who knew that John Dos Passos, author of Manhattan Transfer and of Portuguese descent, brought Portuguese pole beans to Truro? The Provincetown Banner reported that Dos Passos gave them to his gardener, Phil Alexander, who was the first to grow them in town 70 or 80 years ago.

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Fishermen get an early start in Chatham. Take Hunter Maher, who’s been fishing commercially with his father since he was 11. The Cape Cod Chronicle reports that Maher has participated in one of the modern requirements of the profession: testifying at the Statehouse two years ago and on Capitol Hill last month on fisheries management issues.

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The Register may have been a little late getting to its own 175th birthday party – celebrating the Dec. 15, 1836 event with a special section on March 8, 2012 – but editor John Basile and his gang put together a good-looking, readable package. Also, “young old-timers” Dana Hornig (former editor) and Barry Paster (former publisher) joined Seth Rolbein, who rose from cub reporter to editor in chief before starting his Cape Cod Voice, in sharing their stories. Hornig paid homage to Miss Annette Kelley, who joined the paper in 1902 at age 16. “When I walked through the door in 1973,” Hornig wrote, “[she] was still there.” Hornig and Paster, by the way, both worked for the Patriot before their turns at the Reg.

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Things you didn’t know about Joe Lincoln: The famed Cape Cod author had a big hedge around his house in Chatham “not to keep people out, but to keep himself in,” The Cape Cod Chronicle reported. “He said if he saw people going by,” Chatham Historical Society archivist Mary Ann Gray told a reporter, “he couldn’t stop himself from going out and talking to them, which would make him lose time doing work.”

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A broken hip at age 89 can be life-threatening, but Margaret Rogers, now 91, isn’t tapped out yet. The lifelong dancer continues to teach tap class at the Falmouth Senior Center. “Dancing has paid off for me,” Rogers told the Enterprise of her recovery. “I’d go berserk every day if I couldn’t do it.”

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Donna Gomes of Harwich says her mother revered the Virgin Mary. That’s why Gomes was particularly concerned when a statue of Mary disappeared from her mom’s grave. She found it with more than a dozen others, half-buried in a dirt pile. Thus began a struggle between Gomes and the administrators of Holy Trinity Cemetery in Pleasant Lake. The latter say they have to remove such items to allow proper maintenance. Gomes told The Cape Cod Chronicle she sees things differently, and plans to cement the statue to her mother’s gravestone.

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A local paper referred to whales slapping the water with their “tales” in a mating ritual. Guess they’re all talk, no action.